Assassination Vacation (12 page)

It is remarkable that Edwin earned back the public’s affection after his brother had committed such a crime. It says something about his talent and his poise that he could pull this off. I have a recording of Edwin, performing Othello, from an 1890 wax cylinder. It sounds like a voice from the grave, so thick with static the only phrase I can understand is “little shall I.” Though I cannot make out most of the words, something of Edwin’s gentleness comes across, a kind of wispy melancholy I can imagine inspiring more sympathy than scorn.

Perhaps this is the approach Dr. Mudd’s grandson Richard should have taken. Instead of spending his very long life pestering state legislatures to pass resolutions recognizing his grandfather’s innocence, if he really wanted to get the country behind his family name, he should have recorded a hit song or come up with a dance craze or something.

In Bel Air, the Booths’ hometown in Maryland, Edwin is a local hero. The Edwin Booth Memorial Fountain stands in front of the courthouse, next to a sign announcing that Edwin made his theatrical debut in the building. A WPA mural in the post office depicts the scene: a gangly teenager in tails leans pompously toward the assembled audience, half of whom have their heads in their hands they look so bored. A roadside historical marker at Tudor Hall reads, “The home of the noted actor Junius Brutus Booth, the Elder. Birthplace of his children. His son Edwin Booth was born here November 13, 1833.” That’s the whole sign. No mention of John Wilkes unless you count that cryptic reference to “his children.”

Edwin’s Players Club still exists in Gramercy Park. It remains the club Edwin envisioned, a fancy place for actors and their friends to get together. Edwin, the illegitimate son of a drunk, the heartbroken brother of an assassin, longed for propriety and elegance. He was an actor back when theater was one of the trashier professions. His actor brother offing the president in a theater didn’t improve his profession’s profile. Thus did Edwin establish the Players. It’s a beautiful house. I’ve been inside a few times, mostly for literary events. The last time I went, after wandering around and admiring the Edwin memorabilia on display — the John Singer Sargent portrait of Edwin hanging over the fireplace, the helmet he wore as Brutus in
Julius Caesar
— I listened to a novelist confess that his childhood sexual awakening occurred while watching a Porky Pig cartoon in which Porky dressed up in high heels.

Edwin would have loved his statue in Gramercy Park — the first statue of an actor in the city. He warranted a stained-glass window too — a multicolored Shakespearean portrait in the Church of the Transfiguration on Twenty-ninth. Known as the Little Church Around the Corner, it became an actors’ church in the nineteenth century because it was the one church in town where actors would be granted a proper funeral.

The church hosted Edwin’s funeral on June 9, 1893. Just as his pallbearers were carrying his coffin out the door in New York, in Washington, three floors of Ford’s Theatre collapsed. The building had been turned into a government office building after the Lincoln assassination. Twenty-two federal employees died.

“I
n this room, the last of Abraham Lincoln’s fourteen funerals took place,” says the tour guide upstairs at the Old State Capitol building. “At eight o’clock on May third, 1865, after making eleven stops, Lincoln’s funeral train arrived here in Springfield. An honor guard escorted his casket to this room.”

The guide, who has a white beard and wears glasses on a chain around his neck, has shown us — and by us I mean uniformed seventh graders on a field trip from their all-girls school in Chicago and me — into the semicircular former chamber of the Illinois House of Representatives, which was, he claims, “the biggest room in the state of Illinois in 1839.”

A platform, he says, was built under the painting of George Washington to hold Lincoln’s casket. It was here under the Washington portrait’s gaze that the future president delivered his “House divided” speech in 1858, famously prophesizing that “this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” unaware that he would be the man to fulfill this prophecy, that he would be the man who made the government “all one thing, or all the other,” and that for his trouble he would be murdered only to end up here, again beneath this portrait, a corpse. “In twenty-four hours, seventy-five thousand people came to pay their respects. The population of Springfield at that time was only sixteen thousand seven hundred.”

The tour guide has an overly generous idea of the schoolgirls’ knowledge of history because he keeps quizzing them and patiently waiting out interminably awkward silences for answers that never come. In the Senate chamber, he shows them a painting of a dashing old man in a fur coat who looks like Oscar Wilde as played by Gerard Depardieu. The guide wants the girls to guess the gent’s identity, dropping loads of clues about how he’s French and he served in the Revolutionary War and
HE’S FROM FRANCE.
It’s a relief when the guide finally gives up, shouting, “Marquis de Lafayette!”

I am invariably the odd man out on tours like this. The only people who take them are kids who are forced to endure them and elderly retirees. I am always either the oldest person on a tour, or the youngest. I prefer to be the youngest if only because usually that means I’m the prettiest by default. (Before coming here to the capitol I had already dropped in for the tour at Lincoln’s law office, a place overrun by nineteen very mature Ohioans, one of whom told me that they were having a reunion here in Springfield, a reunion commemorating a caravan they all took to Alaska sixteen years ago. That’s how very old they are — old enough to have been taking trips like this for sixteen years. They make no comments about the horsehair sofa with a copy of the
New York Tribune
strewn over it to suggest a lounging Lincoln lying there reading aloud or the kind of upside-down top hat the disorganized lawyer is said to have used as his only filing cabinet, but they have plenty to say about having to go up and down stairs, concluding that “it’s sure easier going down.”)

In the Old State Capitol, one of the seventh graders points to a brassy object, asking the tour guide, “What’s that big bowl?” The guide, shocked, answers, “That’s a cuspidor, a spittoon.” I can understand how these kids might not have heard of Lafayette, but is it possible they have never seen a single episode of
Gunsmoke
?

By the time we arrive at the statue of Lincoln’s old debating partner (and possible rival for the hand of Mary Todd), Senator Stephen Douglas, the guide demands the Chicago kids tell him Douglas’s nickname. Clearly, they don’t even know Douglas’s actual name so, a little impatient to get out of here, I can’t stop myself from blurting out, “Little Giant. They called him the Little Giant.” One of the kids looks at me, then at the diminutive statue of Douglas, who was five foot three. She raises her hand and wants to know why someone so short would be called a giant. To which the guide, exasperated, mumbles, “Well, he was a giant in
politics.
”

L
incoln’s tomb in Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery is a towering white obelisk plopped on top of a crypt of marble corridors decorated with bronze tablets of his best-loved speeches and reproductions of the greatest hits of Lincoln statuary, including the seated Lincoln sculpture by Daniel Chester French in Washington’s Lincoln Memorial, the August Saint-Gaudens in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. It’s all a little busy, overly chockablock.

The remains of Mary Todd Lincoln, as well as those of their sons Tad, Willie, and Eddie, are buried in the tomb. There’s also an inscription for the oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, noting that he’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery. (There’s a story as to why — supposedly, his widow couldn’t stand the thought of her husband, and eventually herself, spending all of eternity next to her dreaded mother-in-law — but of course that’s not brought up here.)

What looks like Lincoln’s tomb is surrounded by flags and inscribed in gold letters with Secretary of War Stanton’s deathbed proclamation, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Actually, the president is buried below, under ten feet of concrete. His son Robert, who became a lawyer for the Pullman Palace Car Company, witnessed the burial arrangements of his boss, George Pullman, a man so loathed by his formerly striking workers that he had himself buried under cement and steel so as to prevent the desecration of his grave. Robert was always worried about the security of his father’s tomb, especially after the Secret Service had thwarted a grave-robbing plot in 1876 when a counterfeiting gang cooked up a plan to steal Abraham Lincoln’s remains and hold them for ransom in exchange for the release of their imprisoned engraver. Robert liked Pullman’s approach and shelled out seven hundred dollars to pour concrete on top of his dad.

The Museum of Funeral Customs is on the edge of Oak Ridge Cemetery, a five-minute walk from the tomb. Supposedly the fellow who swoops over to greet me is the museum director, but he speaks in the hushed low voice of a funeral director. He warns me about “the sensitive nature of our exhibits.”

Please. I actually giggle when he tries to steel me for seeing the re-created 1920s embalming room, as if I’m not wearing Bela Lugosi hair clips; as if I didn’t just buy a book for my nephew called
Frankenstein and Dracula Are Friends;
as if I was never nicknamed Wednesday (as in Addams); as if in eighth-grade English class, assigned to act out a scene from a biography, when all the other girls had chosen Queen Elizabeth or Anne Frank, I hadn’t picked Al Capone and staged the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with toy machine guns and wadded-up red construction paper thrown everywhere to signify blood; as if I’m not here to see the replica of Abraham Lincoln’s casket; as if I’m not the kind of person who would visit the freaking Museum of Funeral Customs in the first place.

Lincoln’s walnut casket was “covered in broadcloth and adorned with silver studs.” Black, it has a white satin interior and white fringe. It’s also decorated with silver stars. The effect is startling. The only word I can think of to describe it is “snazzy.” It has a country-and-western showbiz quality, reminding me of the shiny rhinestone-studded suits Nashville singers used to wear to the Grand Ole Opry.

I stand there and read a very interesting brochure entitled
The Embalming of President Lincoln.
It makes note of the fact that the Lincoln funeral train was the best advertising the nascent embalming industry could have hoped for. Around one million people saw the president lying in state as his funeral train came back to Springfield. Embalmed by the firm of Brown & Alexander, Lincoln’s body was attended throughout its long trip home by the firm’s staff, including the very bearded Henry P. Cattell. They were, according to the brochure,

able to keep Lincoln in a presentable viewing condition with the help of local embalmers and undertakers along the way. Though often noting these discolorations, newspaper accounts generally reported favorably on the president’s appearance.

Another brochure, this one devoted to the nearby tomb of Lincoln, concludes with the thought that since thousands of people come to Springfield every year to visit Lincoln’s tomb, then “the National Lincoln Monument Association completed its task of erecting a tribute that conveys the country’s estimate placed upon his life, virtues, and public services.”

While I appreciate the local boosterism behind that sentiment, in a museum across town there is another object that is the best indication of the esteem for Lincoln I have ever seen — more than the marble tomb, more than even the marble Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., more than any book, statue, lock of hair, bloodstained collar, top hat, or plaque.

Any old forgettable rich guy might warrant a marble tomb, an obelisk, or elaborate sculptures after death, but you know you are regarded with a ridiculous, religious amount of awe when they put your dug-up drainpipe in a museum. It’s on display here in Springfield at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, a complex including the home the Lincolns lived in from 1844 until they left for Washington in 1861, as well as several neighboring houses, each a museum named for its occupants in 1860. Tim Townsend of the National Park Service, the site’s historian, was showing me around one of these museums, the Dean House, when I spotted the drainpipe of devotion.